“Flat ground ahead,” Gorilla advised.
Ten minutes later, the ground began to level. They were back out onto glacial plain. No sooner had they reached a stretch that looked promising for a crossing, Gorilla called, “Whoa! Anomaly!” His voice was soft but urgent.
“What type?” Bell Toll asked as Shiva waved the troops into a perimeter.
“Not here,” Gorilla answered with a shake of his head. “Forward and west. Energy reading of some kind. It’s small and not moving.”
“Isn’t that just great?” Bell Toll asked facetiously. “Okay, keep the bots safely back but find out what you can. Everyone sit tight here. Tirdal, what’ve you got for me? Can you sense it?”
“Yes, I can now,” he nodded. “It’s very faint. It’s not Tslek. There’s something there, but it doesn’t even seem alive. Just… there, present. And it has a psychic component. More than that I cannot say. But definitely not alive.”
“Okay, Ferret will lead, you move up closer to him and keep alert. Remember that he has more experience at sneaking. Gorilla, get your bots out wide and move slowly; we don’t want to spook whatever it is, but we’ve got to take a look ourselves. Shiva, plot us two escape routes — one slow and cautious, one go-to-hell. Everyone ping me acknowledgment… okay, let’s do it.”
Tirdal and Ferret dropped their rucks and crept forward. The relayed image from Gorilla’s bots helped them keep to low ground and clear of the knotted webs of roots. The ground was soft and mushy again, and it soaked through their suits, the wetness permeating the air with the smell of damp and rotting life. The only animals they saw were the smallest scavengers and stem-eating types. While crawling, they were below the umbrellalike canopies of bushes. Their route through the looping roots of the trees took them past a local anthill analog, busily trafficked by beetle-creatures less than a centimeter long. Ferret shook off a few that tried to bite and sting, taking him for some dead source of protein.
“Ouch,” he muttered. “Gonna have welts from that. They aren’t as bad as those other little bastards, but watch them, Tirdal.”
“I see them,” Tirdal said. “Stand by.” He pulled a scrap of uneaten ration from his smaller ruck and waved it past the nest, then dropped it a meter away. It was a sugary cookie and the eager little monsters swarmed it and ignored him.
“Let’s see the bots-eye view,” Ferret asked. Gorilla obliged and relayed a near-ground-level image in the visible spectrum. There was an almost-clearing ahead; one of those spots where the trees thinned enough for a dropship insertion or a small camp. The bots had stopped there. They’d been programmed to pause if they encountered anything with a pattern not on file as “natural,” and what was here certainly wasn’t.
“Is that what we’re looking at?” Ferret asked.
“At and for,” Gorilla replied. “I dunno what it is.”
All that could be seen was a thin spot in the trees. Within were some lumps and mounds. They resembled burial cairns from some lost civilization, weathered and beaten for ages. There was a wrongness to the area that even the humans could feel.
“The source is in there somewhere,” Gorilla said. “No threats show. I’ve got both bots watching it and the flyers perched on trees on the far side. Nothing except local life.”
“Gorilla,” Bell Toll said, “send a bot in slowly. One step at a time. Ferret and Tirdal can pull up to the edge. We’ll stay back for support. Thor and Shiva, keep an eye on our asses.” There were pings of acknowledgment and the team moved.
They’d shifted perhaps five meters when Gorilla said, “Stop.” Everyone froze, fingers on triggers, until he said, “No threat, but I’ve IDed the source. Central mound, right there. Power emanations, but very low.”
“Okay,” Bell Toll acknowledged. “Let’s move in. Ferret and Tirdal wait where you are. Gun Doll and I will take a supporting position on the left. Dagger and Shiva on the right. Gorilla will pull up and relieve Ferret, then Ferret advances.”
Upon closer inspection, the area wasn’t a clearing at all. It was tree covered, like the surrounding terrain, but in a radius around the central mound the trees were slightly stunted and there were stones poking up through the loam. It was the lack of animals and the stunted trees that gave it an odd feel.
“Radiation?” asked Bell Toll.
“Not much above background levels,” Gorilla said after studying his sensors.
“There’s a minor pulse to the emitted frequency,” Dagger added. “It’s steady. Nothing dangerous to us, but I suppose after enough years it builds up. There also might be chemicals in the soil, depending on what this device is. The surface here reads differently. And those stones are odd.”
They were among the mounds, now. Ferret and Thor had their backs in, as did Gun Doll, her automatic cannon moving in slow sweeps as she studied the trees.
Tirdal brushed at one of the stones and examined the striations revealed beneath the clinging dirt. It was an extruded block, not carved native stone.
“Plascrete,” he said softly.
The others shifted carefully over to him.
“What did you say?” Bell Toll asked.
“Plascrete,” he repeated. “Look at the extrusion marks and the texture. It was produced on site with no concern for prettiness.”
Gun Doll ran her fingers over the chipped corners of the revealed mass.
“How old does plascrete have to be to crack and crumble like that?”
“Very old, I would guess… and Sense,” Tirdal said.
Spreading out and examining other revealed rocks determined that the place was a ruin. It was some sort of very old building or fortification, hundreds, possibly thousands of years old. All that was left were a few mounds of tumbled plascrete overgrown with misshapen, gene-damaged trees and tangled vines. In the cold drizzle and half-light, it was an eerie, disturbing scene.
Gorilla had the bot dig into the lump, carefully. It made quiet incursions by drill, split cracks between the holes with a pneumatic ram and gingerly pulled out sections. It then made another cut, slightly deeper. Ferret, Dagger and Shiva stayed in an outer perimeter, nerves naked wires, alert for any threatening movement, or any movement at all. The other half of the troop formed to contain anything that might erupt from within the dig.
“Energy source,” Tirdal said.
“Yes?” prompted Bell Toll.
“I’m not sure. Just some source of energy. They all feel somewhat alike… heat, radio, UV… just a sense of intruding rays, not enough to be harmful.”
“Got that, Gorilla?” Bell Toll asked.
“Got it,” he nodded softly, adjusting the bot to dig wider before going deeper. “We’re going to have to either hide these blocks the bot is cutting, or stick them back when done. A pile will be a giveaway.”
“Yes,” Bell Toll agreed. “But it can’t be much deeper now, can it?”
In answer, Tirdal said, “There.”
“Yeah, the bot sees it now,” Gorilla agreed, looking at his screen. “I’m clearing around it. It’s a root power source of some kind, encased in plasteel.”
Bell Toll dialed up enhancement and resolution on his helmet and tried to get a glimpse into the hole, past the ludicrously hulking limbs of the small bot.
“Oh, shit,” he said softly.
“What?” asked Gun Doll, being closest. She pulled up her own screen and said, “ ‘Oh, shit’ is right.”
Enough of the case was revealed for its architecture to become apparent. That combined with the energy readings made it familiar to anyone who studied history or matters military.
It was an Aldenata artifact. Apparently a functional one.
The Aldenata were extinct. It had been they who had bred the Posleen for war, and screwed it up so as to leave the Posleen a marauding threat. They’d created the Darhel, who could administrate but not fight to defend themselves. The Indowy, Tchpth and possibly the humans had been tampered with by them, also. Besides the damaged races of this part of the galaxy, they’d left a few installations and a very few artifacts. Whatever had done them in had been thorough. No one knew. Or at least, no humans. The other races didn’t discuss it much.